UN chief demands action over stark climate report
A Nobel-winning UN panel of scientists today issued a stark vision of human hardship and vanishing species in a world growing increasingly hot.
The report prompted UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon to challenge governments to join hands against climate change.
“The world’s scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice,” Mr Ban said, looking ahead to a critical climate conference in two weeks. “I expect the world’s policymakers to do the same.”
Mr Ban arrived at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meeting in Valencia, Spain, from a fact-finding trip to Antarctic and South America.
The IPCC, which shares this year’s Nobel Peace prize with former US vice president Al Gore, adopted a report along with a concise Summary for Policymakers after five days of sometimes tense negotiations among 140 national delegations.
Climate change is here, the reports said, as witnessed by melting snow and glaciers, higher average temperatures and rising sea levels. If unchecked, global warming will spread hunger and disease, put further stress on water resources, cause fiercer storms and more frequent droughts, and could drive up to 70% of plant and animal species to extinction, it said.
Mr Ban said he witnessed the devastation of climate change in disappearing glaciers of Antarctica, the deforested Amazon and under the ozone hole in Chile.
“These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie,” said Mr Ban. “But they are even more terrifying because they are real.”
The report offered dozens of measures for avoiding the worst catastrophes if taken together – at a cost of less than 0.12% of the global economy annually until 2050. They ranged from switching to nuclear and gas-fired power stations, developing hybrid cars, using more efficient electrical appliances and managing arable land to store more carbon.
The fourth and final IPCC report this year distils the three earlier reports totalling more than 3,000 pages into six brief chapters and a 23-page summary. It was intended to be an easy-to-read guide for some 10,000 delegates meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to set a political course for fighting climate change.
IPCC reports are adopted by consensus, meaning participating countries accept the underlying science and cannot disavow its conclusions. While it does not commit governments to specific action, it provides a common scientific baseline for the political talks.
“This report will have an incredible political impact,” said Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate change official, calling it a “scientific compass” for the Bali negotiators. “It’s a signal that politicians cannot afford to ignore.”
In Brussels, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas welcomed the report as “vital reading for decision makers.”
Advocacy groups praised the panel for resisting political pressures. “This report is the strongest one yet from the IPCC,” said Stephanie Tunmore of Greenpeace.
The Bali talks, delayed by four weeks to allow the panel to produce its report, should launch negotiations and set an agenda for the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol. That 1997 pact required 36 industrial nations to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.
A new agreement must be concluded within two years to ensure a smooth transition to a new regime when the Kyoto terms expire.
“I look forward to seeing the US and China playing a more constructive role starting from the Bali conference,” Mr Ban told reporters. “Both countries can lead in their own way.”
At the same time, he advised against apportioning blame. Climate change imperils “the most precious treasures of our planet,” he said, and the effects are “so severe and so sweeping that only urgent global action will do. We are all in this together. We must work together,” he said.
The United States opted out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing that the science was unproven and that the burden of mandatory emission cuts was unfair since it excluded fast-growing China and India.
Chief US delegate Sharon Hays said doubts have been dispelled. “What’s changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening,” she said in a conference call yesterday. She did not indicate that Washington would abandon its policy of voluntary emission cuts.
China and India have said any measures impinging on their development and efforts to lift their people from poverty were unacceptable – a point likely to be heeded at the Bali talks.
Mr Ban said a new agreement should provide funding to help poor countries develop clean energy resources, adapt to climate conditions and give them the technology to help themselves.
The report says emissions of carbon, which comes primarily from fossil fuels, must stabilise by 2015 and go down after that.
In the best-case scenario, temperatures will continue to rise from carbon already in the atmosphere, the report said.
Even if factories were shut down today and cars taken off the roads, the average sea level will reach as high as 4.6 feet higher than the pre-industrial period, or about 1850.
“We have already committed the world to sea level rise,” said IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. If the Greenland ice sheet melts, the scientists could not even predict by how many feet the seas will rise, drowning coastal cities.
As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia’s megacities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, the report says.
